There were rumors (Google CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted about it saying “hell had frozen over”) that Google would air its first ever major TV commercial during the Super Bowl. So while watching the Super Bowl yesterday, I eagerly waited to see if all of the tweets and rumors were true – and sure enough Google aired a touching commercial called ‘Parisian Love’. Google explained on their blog that the commercial had been up on YouTube for a few months and already had 1.2 million views. They had such positive reaction that they wanted to share it with a larger audience.
The Karcher Group is growing and we’re on the lookout for SEM talent!
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President Barack Obama gave his first State of The Union Address to the nation on Wednesday night. During the live broadcast and for a long while after, the #SOTU (State of The Union) hashtag and several other related phrases were trending topics on Twitter. The President has his own Twitter feed @BarackObama that had live updates with direct quotes from his address to the nation and to Congress.
During the State of The Union Address, I kept an eye on Twitter through my phone. There were several quotes I wanted to Tweet, but I had trouble typing them and paying attention to what he was saying. I thought I had found a solution to the problem: the @BarackObama Twitter feed. However, to my dismay, I was unable to RT (retweet) his posts because of the 140 character limit. I’m not a fan of the new RT features on Twitter and I’m not alone. Very few people that I follow employ the new retweet feature. The new retweet feature is confusing to those seasoned Twitter users who are used to the original retweet, “RT @mikehalvorsen blah.” In addition to this, the new RT feature does not allow additional comments, such as “I love USA RT @BarackObama I never said change would be easy…”
At the end of his address, I checked out the Twitter feed on my desktop and to my shock, almost all of the Tweets made from his account during the address were near the 140 character limit. Out of 12 Tweets posted during the State of The Union Address, only two were RT-able using the old school retweet method.
For anyone using Twitter as a way to spread their brand or message, you must cover all bases. If you want your message to be spread around the Twittersphere, you must fully understand its limitations 140 characters at a time.
For those in charge of handling Barack Obama’s Twitter account and that of The White House, give us a call at 1-800-310-0317 for free Social Media consulting. Make sure you ask for me.
Google Webmaster Tools created a quiz based on the most commonly asked questions they receive. The quiz will be available until January 27 at 9pm EST.
By taking this quiz and comparing your answers with the answers they will publish at a later date, you should be able to gauge your understanding of Google Webmaster Tools and some SEO basics.
Go take the quiz and remember to print your answers so you can compare them to the real answers when they publish them.
It seems like everyone has been talking about the Google vs. China scandal, so why can’t I? As almost everyone knows, Google and China have had problems in the past but a situation that occurred a few days ago was the last straw for Google.
The search engine giant discovered that hackers were attempting to access the Gmail addresses of several key Chinese human rights activists. Google has speculated that the attack was coordinated by the Chinese government itself, a claim that the Chinese have quickly denied. Google wasn’t the only business attacked; at least 20 other American companies were targeted as well. China insists that their censorship on the Internet is in the best interests of their people, but can anyone truly agree with that? Google has announced that it has decided to stop censoring its search results in China, but no action has been taken yet.
It looks like the Google Local Business Center has added a nifty little feature to their dashboard. The box is labeled “Post to Your Place Page” and it is almost like “sticky note” that goes on your local business listing detail page.
This feature is almost like a status update that a business can post to their listings page similar to updating Facebook or Twitter. The listing expires after 30 days but can be refreshed more frequently than that. The business owner is limited to 160 characters for this message as well.
It will be interesting to see how/if businesses will start to use this feature and if it has any effect on the local business listing’s ranking. Any creative ideas on how you’ll use this feature?
Search engine optimization is constantly changing. Knowledge and details are very important in the SEO world. In this post, I will continue on from a previous post – ‘Give your New Site an SEO Boost’ and give you 5 tips for creating strategies that will help your site rank better, as well as help increase traffic and conversions.
Content – It is important that the content you create is high quality and written by someone that researches the topic before jumping headfirst into writing it. Creating new content throughout your entire site is time-consuming, but will separate and elevate you from the rest.
Link Building – Create a custom link building campaign and try to gain links from trusted sites that are relevant to the topic of your site. Link building needs to be an ongoing project and also requires a lot of research. Check out some more link building tips that I recommended in a previous post.
Page Titles & Descriptions – Page titles are how the search engines identify the relevancy of your page. Each page title should be unique to what that page is about and try not to over-use phrases, or it might dilute your efforts. Meta-descriptions are what the users see in the Search Engines when your site pops up in the results. They also organically help your site rank.
Site Architecture & Navigation – If you have good navigation in place, it not only helps the users click around your site better, but it helps the Search Engines navigate through your site better too. This includes footer navigation, menus, breadcrumb navigation and even how pages are interlinked with each other.
Keyword Terminology - In your content, use 2 or 3 keyword phrases that you use in the page title. Don’t over-do-it (may cause KW dilution), but be sure everything is in line and included – keyword title; keyword phrase in description; internal navigation keyword links; fresh keyword rich content.
If you are new to the SEO world, the tips above should give you a nice solid start to the art of SEO!
I will be joining Anita Campbell, editor-in-chief of Small Business Trends for a free one-hour webinar: 10 Quick Tips to Give a Boost to Your Website & Online Marketing Efforts. It’s presented by the Verizon Small Business Center.
“PageRank sculpting is dead” or “Search engine X doesn’t look at the meta keywords tag” or “Insert your favorite SEO catch-phrase”. A lot of times people in this industry get caught up in the hype of the new buzz topic, which I admit, I have. Something new and shinny is being talked about and it controls a lot of the talk in forums and on blogs. This year alone PageRank sculpting with nofollow was a big discussion. People used it, the search engines then said it didn’t work and then it was in the spotlight again. Did it really not work? It wouldn’t be the first time a search engine said something but the reality was different (Yahoo claiming they don’t use the meta keywords tag as an example).
We chose the following five PageRank sculpting methods to test:
Rel=‘nofollow’ – The standard mechanism for nofollowing a link. example
Link Consolidation – Consolidating low priority pages. You can read more about link consolidation here.
Iframe – Include a standard link in an iframe that is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots so engines can’t follow it.
Javascript – An external Javascript file (blocked from robots) that inserts links into divs when the page renders.
Control Case – Null test with standard links.
The post is worth a read through as it lays out a good test and shows the results. This test is more evidence that testing IS important. How can you say something works or doesn’t work if you haven’t tested it? Just because someone tells you something, or the search engines say something, that doesn’t really mean that is really what is going on. I think certain things also come in cycles as the algorithms change. Some minor element may not work today or might not have as much importance/weight put on it, but who’s to say it is going to stay that way? In Danny’s post he establishes 2 points at the beginning of his post that I also want to share:
1. There is overwhelming evidence that from a “ROI on time spent working” perspective, there is much more value in link building and creating content that is link-worthy than obsessing over search engine algorithm fluctuations like PageRank sculpting. Link building is human oriented and thus more inline with the long term goals of the search engines. Links also have the added bonus of being easy to measure and thus easier to prioritize.
2. We can’t directly measure how PageRank flows so we can only infer results. This needs to be acknowledged when interpreting test results. That said, we also can’t directly measure objects outside our solar system and this solution of inference has become the basis for modern Astronomy. (If it is good enough for NASA, it is good enough for SEOmoz ;-p)
As the year comes to an end, everyone begins to prepare for a new start in 2010 but we can’t do that without looking back and reflecting on 2009. One trend that I think deserves some attention is the upward shift in comparison search tools. These tools allow users to compare rankings from two or more search engines, which can be very useful to SEO’s.
Comparison search tools enable users to run a query in multiple search engines at one time. This allows me, as a Search Engine marketer to quickly glance at the results to see what sites are ranking for a phrase I’m targeting for a client. Comparison tools enable me to be more efficient and more easily provide results for our SEO clients. Knowing who is already ranking for a phrase in multiple search engines and what SEO tactics (if any) they are implementing on their site will help me create effective strategies as well as successfully track my strategies.
Search Engine Land has a great blog post about some of the best comparison tools of 2009. Learn more about these comparison search tools.
As almost everyone knows, Google and China have had problems in the past but a situation that occurred a few days ago was the last straw for Google.
