Month: September 2012

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LinkedIn and Twitter Broke Up But LinkedIn Moved On

Although the fact that Twitter cut LinkedIn loose, meaning that Twitter does not allow Twitter feeds to appear in a LinkedIn page widget anymore is not new news, but the fact that LinkedIn has leveraged this into its own success story is new news.

This article gives a very insightful view of the blunder that Twitter has made in breaking up with LinkedIn. By disavowing their relationship Twitter has encouraged LinkedIn to pursue its own course in direct competition with Twitter.

“Back in July Twitter announced that it was no longer going to allow users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. Twitter gave us the usual gumpf about wanting to “provide the core Twitter user experience through a consistent set of products and tools”. What Twitter really meant to say was, “We don’t want anyone reading tweets where we can’t put ads”.

What LinkedIn then did was to encourage use of their own newsfeed and nicely integrated it with HootSuite and easy sharing sites. Now for business people the LinkedIn newsfeed may actually be more meaningful for them than a Twitter feed.

This was a very foolish shortsighted decision on Twitter’s part. If they had stayed the course they could have expanded into the business market and created a very nice partnership with LinkedIn. My feeling is that in the long run, business people may leave Twitter totally to the spammers and ads and move full throttle over to LinkedIn now that they have a full social and interaction platform.

If you are not posting updates to LinkedIn, now’s the time to give that some consideration and review our LinkedIn update services.

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Google AdWords Introduces Shared Budgets for Campaigns

Just this past week Google announced a very big change in how they do budgets for your AdWords account. Introducing Shared Budgets for Google AdWords campaigns. You can read the full release on the Google blog.

Although this sounds great, I have already had experience with Shared Budgets already last week and want to let you know to be careful and choose carefully what you share.

With a Shared Budget, this is how it is supposed to work. You select which Campaigns (not ad groups) you want to share budgets between. If you have one campaign that does not spend its daily budget on a regular basis and one which does, you can choose to share budgets. Google says this:

“Using shared budgets allows automatic adjustments across campaigns, so you don’t have to constantly monitor and change individual campaign budgets throughout the day.”

It sounds good, that money not spent on the one weaker campaign, would flow over to fund the stronger campaign when needed. BUT, this is the reality of what I have already seen this last week on set up.

I set up Shared Budgets, what happened by noon one day is that the entire account budget was spent by a “hog” of a campaign effectively shutting down exposure for the full account. No metering out there, or leftovers given to the strong program, the stronger program overrode all settings of the weaker programs and took every single cent all $166.66 dollars, all of them!

The lesson learned is to be very careful what you share with AdWords Shared Budgets. Watch carefully after you set up the share both several times during the day and for statistical data. Make sure you are not funding a hog at the expense of the rest of the campaigns in your account.

By using Shared Budgets, you are effectively putting all shared campaigns in one campaign and the strong campaign now acting as an ad group in a single campaign will take the most cash at the expense of the others.

I think the idea is great, the but actual execution can create havoc with an account’s funding structure. Use Shared Budgets carefully and watchfully.

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Excluding Social Media From Your Marketing Plan Can Doom Placement

In one of my articles that was recently published on SiteProNews, the conversation thread is very enlightening in regards to the use of social media for organic placement. If you are serious about getting your website to place on Google.com, you’ve got to include the social mix. There is just no way around it. If Google thinks that social media (specifically Google+ and Twitter) are important, why in the world would you refuse to embrace them.

It does not matter if you don’t like Google+ – Google does!

It does not matter if you don’t “get” Twitter – Google includes tweets in their search index.

With the changes that Google has made to its algorithm, information it has disseminated on the Web about Google+, and its avid integration of Google+ and Google+ Locations in its index, you’d be a nut to think you can push against the monster that Google is on the Internet and get placement on their free platform by not participating in these venues. Absolutely nuts! But, that is just the push back my industry is giving. You’ll see when you read the comments from my article.

While you’re at it, read the comments on this one too about other who don’t get social media and want to rant about it.

As I look at each of the commenter’s notes and weigh what Google has clearly said and is doing with its algorithm, it is very clear to me that there will be winners and losers in this new world of post Panda and Penguin updates. The losers will be those that say I don’t like Google+, I don’t want to use is. The winners will be those that say, maybe I don’t like it, but Google thinks it is important and so for placement I think it is important.

Which avenue will you embrace? For me, I am learning all there is to know about Google+ and am actively working to leverage success there for my own business. How about you?

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The New Face of SEO Has Three Sides

If you have a website, are a webmaster, or are simply tired of paying per click and want to improve your organic search placement, you’ve got a very hard job ahead of you now that Google has shifted its racking and stacking algorithm that determines who is in what position.

SEO as we’ve known it before is dying. Although for now, there are some strategies that still seem to work, Google is effectively and actively targeting them one by one with filters in their index. This is very bad news for sites that have leaned heavily in code optimization and keyword density for organic placement, but good news for those that have built authority content-rich websites.

I feel that the new face of SEO has a three pronged focus: content, social media, and blogging.

Content

There is a new focus on having quality unique content on your website. Content that is more than a brochure about your services; rather content that explains the why and importance in the broader scheme of what you do. Content you create should be natural and readable. Mention the phrase you want to place for two times on the page and then use synonyms in a natural way. This means that pages should be smaller and really no more than 350 to 400 words long.

Social Media

There is no faster way to build links, share information, and build a community than to participate in social media. Specifically I mean Twitter. It is very important to understand that although there has been a huge push to move businesses into Facebook, Google does not index Facebook updates, but it does index Twitter updates. If you have to choose a place to invest your time and money right now, choose Twitter.

Blogging

Blogging is an easy way to not only build fresh content for your website, improve stickiness, but to build inbound links to your website and on-domain blog in a slow natural way – a way that Google likes. It is not unusual for a website to have several thousand inbound links to blog content after blogging just a year or so.

There are several very important things to remember when you are setting up a blog. Make sure your blog is installed on the same server and using the same domain name as your website. Be consistent in writing to build content and make sure your content is on topic and unique.

If you are interested in having help with any of these needs that reflect the new face of SEO, I invite you to visit our company website to find out more about Twitter, blogging, and website content.