Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it's not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective. But as the social industry matures, marketers and web analysts need true outcome-oriented reports. After all, although social is growing in popularity, brand websites - not social networks - remain the place where people most often purchase or convert. 

This is a keeper, could be useful.

Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days, even 400 milliseconds — literally the blink of an eye — is too long, as Google engineers have discovered.

People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second).

Here’s how to get lots more customers—free—using Google Website Optimizer. Using split testing software like Google Website Optimizer is a powerful way to increase your website’s conversion rate (that is, its ability to turn visitors into customers). Many of the web’s most powerful companies, including Amazon and Google, use this technique. Here’s our essential guide to increasing your conversion rate using split testing software. It contains 108 simple techniques for growing your business.

February 24, 2011 was a day that will live in infamy for the team here at Viewpoints. That was the day of the Google Panda update. Up until that point we had enjoyed four years of consistent traffic growth to Viewpoints.com. We managed to double traffic each year and had just reached 2.7 million unique users. We had heard that Google was planning to update its algorithm to penalize content and link farms and were excited about the bump we might get as a result. Turns out we were in for a bit of a surprise.

The credibility factor is something really important there. Design, usability, content, you need to look credible to your audience. This directly impacts pageviews, time on site, engagement, and better rankings.

It's like a good salesman, if he is looks good, know his stuff, he is credible and will make the sell. 

by steve on February 22, 2012 in SEO In a previous post, we discussed how to use the robots.txt file to prevent search engine crawlers from crawling sections of your website. But what if you only want to restrict how crawlers handle specific pages on the site? Is there a granular way to control how crawlers handle individual pages? Fortunately, there is, and it’s called the robots meta tag. Now that you know what it’s called, I’m sure your mind is full of questions. So let’s start answering them…

• index – allows search engines to index the page
• noindex – prevents search engines from indexing the page
• follow – allows search engine crawlers to follow (i.e., crawl) links on the page
• nofollow – prevents search engine crawlers from following (i.e., crawling) links on the page
• archive – allows search engines to store a cached copy of the page (and show it in the search results)
• noarchive – prevents search engines from storing a cached copy of the page

Google has confirmed a new Panda update at the same time that it’s announcing 40 search updates that happened in February (or are in progress right now).

Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

Marketers talk a lot about advanced techniques for working with their leads: lead flow, lead management, lead nurturing. But all of that is meaningless without consistent lead generation, and landing pages are the strongest tools in a marketer's arsenal to meet that looming monthly lead goal.

AYTM Market Research asked US internet users if they liked the idea of personalized search results. Of respondents, 15.5% said yes, they would like personalized search results, while 39.1% said yes, but that they were also concerned with privacy. Additionally, 45.4% said they would prefer everyone to see the same search results.

I have to agree with the 45%. I feel like i am potentially missing on something good or new.

Some people might say that there's no way Google could be more aware of your browsing habits. Not true! There is much they don't know. But it's not because they don't want to know. Last night Google rolled out two programs aimed at increasing their awareness of how people use their browsers — what sites they visit, for how long, for what purpose, etc. They'll pay you for the privilege, a bit like being a Nielsen family. They even give you a little box!

You can make up to $25 :) Do they really need to know more than they already do? 

Hear that, content marketers? That is the sound of inevitability ... the sound of you creating a Google+ page for your business. Here's why.

Building an audience on Google+ may be the smartest thing you do as a content marketer when it comes to improved search rankings. You still need to understand the language of your audience and reflect it back in your content, but Google will now have direct indications that you’re putting out quality stuff.

And yes, Google Plus is Google, it's that simple. So as a marketer, you have to be on Google Plus because it will affect your livelihood.

• Sign Up For a Newsletter – As pictured above, you can simply sign up for an advertiser’s newsletter right in the search result, without ever going to a landing page.
• Request a Call – These allow a visitor to input their number and request a call from the advertiser.
• Request an Email – Similarly, by clicking on a plus box in an ad, the searcher can request an email from the advertiser.

Google finally released Currents, it's (delayed) reader app that it decided to make after it failed to acquire Flipboard.

Currents is all about curated the best content on the web and bringing it to you in a stylish, easy to read format.

The result with Currents is a cleaner product that always guarantees you're keeping up with the latest news you're interested in.

It's pretty obvious they borrowed a lot from Flipboard, but the app is still gorgeous.

The other major component to Currents is the Trending section. Here you can choose topics you want to read about and Currents pulls in the top five stories in each category.

Currents also does a great job at adapting to the size of your screen.

Conclusion: Currents is all about curated content and finding you the best stuff on the web to read. Flipboard is mostly about pulling in links and articles your friends are sharing on various social networks or from your RSS.

The social data hub is a free platform that social networks and other social platforms can use to integrate their activity streams— like +1, votes, and comments—with Google Analytics.

• Enable your social network to be visible to marketers, publishers and analysts using Google Analytics
• Promote a broad, comprehensive and inclusive picture of the global social media landscape
• Advance accessible measurement of all social media platforms and activities

US judge orders hundreds of sites "de-indexed" from Google, Facebook

Luxury goods maker Chanel has convinced a judge to order the seizure of hundreds of Internet domain names and to order the names blocked from "all" search engines and social media networks.

As soon as i read this title, i thought the same as pointed in the post:

I'm not sure how this court can direct a registry to change a domain name's registrar of record or Google to de-list a site, but the court does so anyway. This is probably the most problematic aspect of the court's orders.

I'd like to see how this unfolds in the future.

In the first installment of the keyword research series here at KISSmetrics, we took a look at keyword discovery and how to use a combination of several tools to discover new keywords and phrases for your website and content.

"We know from our own experience this will transform businesses worldwide," said Horowitz, Google+ vice president of product.

For example, the Google+ Circles functionality, which lets users segment their "friends" list into different groups, will allow for "intra-enterprise sharing" through Circles for the IT department, the marketing department and the like, that are public within an organization but not necessarily to people outside, he said.

The use of this workplace version of Google+ has "transformed" communications within Google, becoming the preferred tool for many interactions that previously happened via email, wikis or other "sharing mechanisms," Horowitz said.

Last week, a leaked copy of Google's quality rater guidelines appeared. I pulled 16 insights from the document that help you understand how Google thinks about quality.

Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.

Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

Perform speedy site and link prospecting using SiteSkout by Michael King(iPullRank).

Spiders a site, retrieves social metrics, scrapes the page title and meta description and pings Textwise for concepts and categories then showing you all that awesome information as it happens and then exporting it to a CSV file for download and Excel ninjitsu.

It seems lately that social networks aren’t just content with being a social platform where people come to discover and share content among their communities. It seems that many, including the big players of Facebook & Youtube, want to transform into fully fledged media companies. Not only do they want to be the place in which content is shared, but they want to be the place in which new content is created.

Matt Cutts should realize the ramifications of his Tweets. Google appears to be fully aware that scraper websites are ranking higher than original content. We would like you to know that we will only cover Google Panda update problems in the United States. We are developing a policy on how we will collect and post information. Probably the most frustrating part of the Google Panda Update is that there seems to be no solution. We’ve played with code, filed complaints, but nothing seems to work.

Pierre Chappaz is not well known in the United States. The activities of this French (now living in Switzerland) entrepreneur are mostly known in Europe. He’s the founder of Kelkoo, one of the oldest search engines for shopping, and he helped the RSS aggregator Netvibes grow up. Last week, Pierre Chappaz killed [...]