People talk about search engine reputation management (SERM) like it only serves to hide nasty blog articles dated from 2 years before you settled the class action. I’ve noticed this for a while – but never seen it blogged – that savvy companies could use similar SERP-domination techniques for direct response. Specifically, they could save money on coupons.

Let’s imagine how SERM can save you money.

Suppose you’re Mac Cosmetics. Suppose further that your checkout process prompts people for a coupon.

Guess what 90% of people do?

They google ‘Mac cosmetics coupon’ . Or ‘promo code for Mac Makeup’ or whatever combination of (i) “money off” terminology your checkout asks for and (ii) your brand and variations on it.

What happens next?

They find an affiliate coupon publisher site. They click the link to ‘reveal the coupon code’.

And then?

If you’re lucky, all that’s going to cost you is the discount plus the commission for the affiliate that contributed NOTHING to generating the sale…

Or perhaps you don’t give affiliate coupons, so it just costs you for the discount.

But that’s unlikely. Because clever affiliates can use the ‘click to reveal discount’ call to action combined with a “site is loading” page after that. The click-to-reveal button cookies your visitor and the ‘loading page’ isn’t there to ask for patience but really to just reveal the non-affiliate coupon. Depending on your tracking, that cookie may mean paying the aff

iliate even if the coupon isn’t part of the affiliate channel.

If you’re unlucky, what that is going to cost you is the entire sale. The visitor just browsed your site for 5 minutes to find the product, add to cart, go through 90% of your checkout… It’s not a sure thing they’ll do it over for a 10% discount or free shipping.

So what is this notorious “that” in the phrase, “that is going to cost you”?

“That” is a failure to use reputation management to rank your own site and pages for “Brand + coupon” queries.

Gab Goldenberg wrote this on behalf of his sister Maya, an Montreal bridal/wedding makeup artist who also does makeup for commercial and catalogue ad photoshoots, and other styles. You can find Gab’s info below, in the author profile .

Many SEO experts ironically find it easier to get work from contacts that they make online even though there are numerous organizations in their own areas that need their services. Selling SEO services to local businesses requires good lead generation tactics and following through with the leads that you have.

CONTINUE READING THE REST OF THIS POST »

By now, many advanced SEOs will have heard about Tynt, a script that lets websites with good content build links automatically. A new competitor to Tynt has just been created, and it’s self-hosted.I’m getting ahead of myself though… For those who don’t know what Tynt is, let me quote from Tynt’s site.

“Our patent pending Tynt Insight technology tracks what’s being copied off your site and automatically adds a link back to your content with every paste.”

Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0YfhD8AgN

I didn’t create that link – Tynt did. Whenever you copy off Tynt’s site, and paste the resulting content elsewhere, that new content has a link added to it. So if your content is worth quoting, you get links.

I just got an email from Brett Barros, a student at MIT, who’s coded up a self-hosted competitor to Tynt. When he told me about his Link Building Pro, I wasn’t too impressed, since I knew about Tynt. But there are some pretty important differences. As Brett puts it:

“There are a few key differences from Tynt.

1. Most importantly for SEO, my script makes use of the meta keyword [tag] for the link text. [It pulls one of the page's keywords from the meta keywords tag and uses it as anchor text.]

2. Second most importantly for SEO, it automatically adds focused links into the text from elsewhere on the page. Thus, the paragraph itself is embedded with *added* links.

3. It is 40% smaller in file size. You can also merge the javascript into other javascript files, reducing the total files the user needs to load (speed optimization will be important with the Google Caffeine update).

4. If Tynt’s servers go down, and you use Tynt,  your site will have problems. With my script, you host it yourself [so there's no worries about other people's server reliability].

5. You can specify areas of the page where the script won’t activate (like in code blocks).”

Also, while I can’t seem to find Tynt’s pricing on their site, Brett’s offering his tool as a free download. How can you quibble with free?

Gab Goldenberg wrote this on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, one of the leading marketing companies in Dublin, Ireland. They offer web design amongst other things, like seo.

As per usual, this is a super quick blog post, but i downloaded the latest Facebook application for the iPhone and noted some new changes. Firstly you get the ability to sync your contact images with that of your friends on Facebook. Could this mean the death of apps like FriendSync? However you still cannot copy the entire Facebook phonebook to your device, which doesn’t bother me but i am sure a lot of people would like it.

Secondly you can know get push notifications for Messages, Wall Posts, Comments, Tagged pictures and a couple of other things.

Mashable has a pretty good write up which i have blatantly stolen and pasted below…

Up until now, the Facebook iPhone app [iTunes link] had everything but push notifications. The launch of version 3.1, however, remedies that ill. The other 3.1 biggie is the ability to sync your Facebook friends with your phone’s address book contacts — photos and all.

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Push Notifications

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When 3.0 came out this summer, there were some vocal complaints that the Facebook () iPhone () app didn’t do push notifications; it seems like basic functionality for any post-iPhone OS 3.0 application. Now when you start the app up after updating, you’ll be prompted asking if it’s okay to do notifications. Once you’ve said yes, it follows the standard iPhone notifications rules. You can customize what you’ll receive in settings.

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Address Book Syncing

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Right after you allow or deny notifications at the beginning, you’ll be asked if you want to sync with your address book. It will sync personal data, and change your contacts’ listed homepages to their Facebook profile URLs if they didn’t list anything themselves. You can choose whether or not to sync profile pictures, but that’s the only customization option you have. Still, it’s a very welcome feature.

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A Minor Quibble

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You’ll probably want to customize your push notification settings right away, because we quickly discovered that all notifications options are on by default: messages, wall posts, friend requests, friend confirmations, photo tags, events and comments. It can get a little spammy, and if you already have e-mail notifications set up (and push e-mail on your phone) you’ll end up getting double notifications for some things. It’s a small hassle, but easily sorted out.

Let me know what you think )

I’ve known for over a year now that acronyms are absolute garbage when it comes to keywords. Today, I’m going to explain why and demonstrate with a few examples.

It’s a known fact that the more specific the intent of a keyword, the better search marketers can convert the traffic. In non-geek marketing speak, the more your prospects know what they want, the easier it is to close the sale.

That’s because they can explain it to you more precisely, so you can do a better job responding to their needs.

So why are acronyms awful keywords?

With acronyms, your task is doubly difficult.

First, you have the problem that, as with other short-tail keywords, there are plenty of things the searcher might have in mind. Someone looking for “ballet” may be interested in the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre of Moscow, in ballet shoes, in ballet music etc.

Second, one acronym can stand for many things. At least with ballet you can exclude the possibility someone is looking for football boots. But consider this acronym, “CCQ.”

To anyone in the Quebec legal profession, that stands for Civil Code of Quebec.

To anyone with a Mozilla Firefox-Google address bar, (in Quebec, at least) typing in CCQ gets you the Commission de la Construction du Quebec, which means that the Commission is Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search result.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s an ad that showed up in my Gmail account where the subject line included the exclamation, “WOW!”

Similarly, I was recently studying for an exam on international law that covered the International Criminal Court, or ICC for short. I saw – and clicked on – this ad:

Makes sense, right? Looks like an ad offering the ability to look through the archive of decisions the ICC has rendered?

Turns out the ad offered exactly what it promised… only the ICC meant the International Chamber of Commerce!

So acronyms are also bad for a third reason, which is that their ambiguity works both to attract useless impressions [which lower your CTR and drive your bids up] as well as to attract useless clicks [which drive your ROI down].

The bottom line is that acronyms, like rats, need to be purged. Your advertising ROI depends on it.

Gab Goldenberg wrote this on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, an online advertising company in Ireland, which complements that offering with SEO and web design.

*Blows dust of keyboard*

Its been a long time since i blogged here. Its kinda weird ya know, if i get a nice little run going then i really get into blogging, but if i stop for a month or so whilst i am trafficking small children across the globe it kind of ruins my stride.

Silly jokes aside though, i just read a post on Mashable which reaffirms what I have been saying for ages when i have been championing technologies like Facebook connect. Users who visit your site from Social Media websites are loyal and they will return, why? Because they probably found your site through a friends recommendation, and people are friends because they have things in common, well either that or they have lots a chocolate chip cookies that they like to give out.

Since i am lazy and i have said all i want to say at 17:24 on a Tuesday afternoon, i am just going to quote the Mashable post about this…

That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analysed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.

According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.

In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.

So just remember, it is always worth having a presence on social media sites, just make sure you do it properly.

Update: So after tweeting about my blog post a few people retweeted, now VModa have sent an @reply to myself and some other people saying that we won the beanie competition. Did I jump the gun and write this post too early, or did the very essence of me writing this post make VModa sort it out? I don’t know but props to them for getting it sorted anyway, and tbh i do like their headphones

So a few months back i bought a pair of V-Moda headphones, i would link you to it but i can’t be bothered to create an Amazon affiliate ID so you can search it yourself Err, anyway, yeah back to the blog post. So i bought these headphones and had some problems with them, as such i decided to follow @Vmoda on twitter and send them a tweet about how my headphones had messed up and i wanted them replaced.

Everything was all good and i got them replaced, but i kept an eye on V-Moda to see how they were marketing their products on Twitter etc. So yesterday they create a tweet saying “Win a V-Moda beanie! First 5 to answer this. What are the ones and two’s”?

Well the obvious answer is that they are decks. Never being one to pass up on a free beanie i decided to answer, to ensure i didn’t miss out i decided to do a search for @vmoda n see who else had managed to respond, looks like i was the 2nd to respond but the 1st with the right answer (I ROCK! – see image below).

So looks like i have won a beanie hat right? Errrr wrong. I sent ANOTHER tweet to V-Moda jokingly asking “where’s my beanie” but they didn’t respond. Regardless of the glorious London sun at the moment I wanted my free prize, so checked twitter today to see if there was any response from V-Moda, none! I thought well i will check their Twitter page, see if there is any announcement about it… err none, and what’s more they have DELETED the original tweet (FAIL! – see image below).

Now i know that the prize was a a shitty beanie, and i know that perhaps someone decided to do such a thing without permission from their elders, however, if someone in your company created a little competition for a prize which probably cost about 0.00000000000000000000001% of your daily turnover, then it is advisable to at least see it through and NOT cover up the evidence that you ever tried it.

I feel cheated out of my beanie hat V-Moda, but more importantly, I think it sucks that you pulled a social-media-back-peddle stunt like that.

I have been a very very naughty boy and not updated my blog in over a month, i will get some more substantial blog posts up soon, but for now have a cool Easter egg i found on Google.

If you don’t get it then you are stupid, simple as that :p

Checking out the twittersphere, and still LOVING real time search,  (which i spoke about in my SMX Presentation btw). I found that quite a lot of people have upgraded their iPhones to firmware 3.0. When i say “quite a lot of people” i actually mean Apple fanatics that have been tweeting up to a bazillion messages an hour, counting down the seconds until Apple released firmware 3.0. I would be one of those people but i am waiting to see what the iPhone Dev Team release until i take my next steps

Source: http://www.thebitsource.com/

Anyway, a lot of people have been upgrading in the UK and trying out the MMS on the iPhone. It seems the majority of people have been having problems so i have gathered some info from around the net that may answer your questions.

In a blog post i wrote last November about How to get MMS working on the iPhone with O2 i stated that iPhone contracts aren’t set up to actually send the MMS message to the device. Instead they hold the message on the internet and send you an SMS message to tell you how to access it using your browser. This indicates that all those contracts would have to be updated to allow MMS message to be sent directly to the device, and of course, O2 would have to send the MMS settings to the iPhone using an over the air update.

This seems to hold somewhat true as many users are tweeting that they couldn’t send MMS message until a text came through from O2 with the MMS settings.

So, if you are having problems, i am afraid your just going to have to wait until O2’s computer gets round to your ‘contract’ and sends you the settings message, then you’ll be MMS’ing in no time.

Oh, and for those that are wondering, the cost of sending an MMS message on O2 with the iPhone is the same as sending 4 SMS messages. That will either be taken from your free text message allowances or, i assume, be charged at 40p 25p (thanks Finch) if you have none remaining for that month.

Some people have also tweeted that you can just send an MMS to 0101 or 1010 and O2 will update your settings. Although i obviously haven’t tried that.

Bonus tip: Want free teathering with your iPhone instead of having to pay out £15 a month? Check out this post on how to do it for free

If you haven’t logged into Facebook tonight then you may not have had a chance to see the new notice which explains that on Saturday 13th June at 05:01 (GMT) you will have the chance to register a URL for your Facebook page. Obviously this makes it a lot easier for people to find you after you meet them at a party or something. Instead of having to search through all the people with the same name to add you as a friend, people will simply be able to type www.facebook.com/yourname

Basically, what will happen is when you login after the above mentioned time, you will get a message asking you to register a URL There are a number of different suggested options and also the chance to pick your own name. Now i imagine that a lot of the big company names are not allowed, however if Facebook aren’t too strict then i wonder how many people will register competitors names. giving us a new form of cyber squating? Will Facebook take steps to stop people registering trademarked names? What happens if you do, will they take that name away from you? These are all questions that are left unanswered that this time.

The above image from the Facebook blog shows how you will be able to select your name, i feel sorry for all the people with common names who are probably going to end up with bobsmith1982 or something alike. Still, i am sure that many people probably wont be that fussed.

So get your alarms set for 05:01 if you want the choice of the so coined ‘vanity url’ that you have always wanted.