By Grant Simmons and originally posted on SearchEngineWatch.com.

Ten years ago, creating a website and getting found in Google wasn’t hard to do. Choose a domain. Learn some basic HTML code. Do some keyword research. Create some title tags andmeta tags. Write about 250 words. And for the most part, you were done.

With Google’s more recent quest for quality, authenticity, authority, and usability, however, many of of the tips that could help get your site to the top of Google 10 years ago might not produce the same results today.

Here are 10 top tips on how to optimize your site for Google’s algorithm today and beyond.

1. Learn & Implement Marketing Basics

Start with a plan, not a prayer.

No matter how many buzzwords, new paradigms, disruptive technologies, or innovative inventions are introduced, search engine optimization (SEO) at its most fundamental is marketing. Marketing on the web, with efforts, outcomes, metrics that matter and competition for marketing dollars.

It doesn’t matter if it’s SEO for a mom and pop store, or a national online retailer. Attacking SEO without a plan is like trying to row a boat with no oars – you might eventually get somewhere, but it won’t be where or when you wanted to arrive.

When I hired my first employee at my agency in 2002, the first thing I did was have them read the excellent “Marketing for Dummies” book, that lays out some basic principles. (they have a greatmarketing cheat sheet for reference)

Answer (at least) these questions:

• What is your expertise?
• What is your differentiation?
• Why should users care?
• Which users (age, locations, interests etc.) should care?
• What is the message and / or media that is going to connect with them?
• Who is your likely competition?
• Why should Google rank you higher than your competition?

Conduct research. Segment your audience. Set realistic goals for your SEO efforts, and then ensure tracking is in place to measure your efforts versus results.

Plan a strategy for your content, including; topics, timelines/editorial calendars, distribution (don’t forget PR), and schedules and frequency. The goal is to exist with a “sizzle”; a reason to rank and/or some expertise worthy of interaction.

2. How to Structure Your Site

Plan your site for topical expertise, organized in a well-siloed, easy to navigate structure.

Although the initial plan sounds like a lot (and it can be!) the goal isn’t to overwhelm and under-deliver on your marketing plan. There are, though, fundamentals in strategically building and/or organizing your site. Leveraging research into your audience, define the topics where you have expertise and/or differentiation (remember, this is marketing 101).

Research your keywords! Read this article on keyword research.

Structure your site around intent-based topics, ensuring content is siloed and distinct (cross-link torelevant and related topics only). Dividing up your site into relevant content topics gives both users and search engines an easy way to identify your expertise, and relevant topics to rank for.

Unless you’re Amazon.com, it’s difficult to be an expert at everything. Better to dominate a niche than try to be everything to everyone – at the beginning at least!

BONUS TIP: If you’re always fighting with designers developers and marketing managers over how SEO ruins usability, don’t despair! Demonstrating successes in SEO often quash the naysayers, so save some gray hair and first shoot for the “least imperfect” site feasible, and then work toward the perfection you desire once you’ve convinced your detractors of SEO value!

3.Build a Digital Footprint

It’s not just about search engines. Embrace traditional marketing, outreach, partnerships, social, guest blogging, inspired mentions, and good old-fashioned relationships.

Apart from SEO is dead (again) chat, the next most popular SEO discussions is always on what SEO should actually be called. “Inbound marketing”, “IMS”, “Search Science,” I’ve probably heard them all, but few terms capture the essence of what SEO should be doing.

With that in mind, I took it on myself to relabel SEO as “Search Everywhere Optimization“ because as SEO folks we are hoping to affect the visibility of our clients sites in many venues on the web, which then creates better visibility in the search results, and more search clicks organically.

With the Search Everywhere mantra, SEO practitioners can finally expand beyond just traditional SEO responsibilities and dabble or partner with PR, social, partnerships, sponsorships and other traditional offline opportunities that get people talking online about brands and their expertise. This includes great events like SES Conference, working with nonprofits and in-store promotions, all of which can fuel the content machine and distribute content and create connections organically: aDigital Footprint.

The goal of a Search Everywhere strategy isn’t to replace traditional marketing agencies, however. It’s about SEO professionals working with them to ensure that every marketing initiative considers the opportunity of creating share-worthy content that can be placed and amplified online via outreach, social and/or PR channels.

The Digital Footprint you create isn’t just for inbound marketing though. Google, as a massive “connections engine,” uses connected entities to assess the trust and authority of sites, companies, individuals, and brands (which really encapsulates all three), leading to the earning of greater topic visibility (i.e., relevant rankings/traffic).

NOTE: It’s not just about links, it’s about citations, connections, mentions and associations. Who you’re ‘seen’ with online matters!

4. Design for Multiple Screens

Create a user-friendly site design that works well and fast across all devices – especially mobile and tablet.

With so much focus on usability, the demise of the desktop browser dominance, and the prevalence of mobile devices, Google’s made it very clear that no mobile experience, no love from Google!

What’s often forgotten in the race to comply with a scary (for some) Google mandate, is that Google isn’t saying every site should be using the same technology, solutions or share the same usability elements. Google understands that some sites need to have a mobile version (this is a site that has it’s own URL structure – normally hosted on an m. sub-domain or within a mobile sub-directory or a main site) and some need a responsive website design (RWD) that adapts to the device used to access it.

NOTE: Responsive design isn’t a brand new idea, but having (almost) ubiquitous browser support is!

There are various resources that provide the hows and how tos, (even Google gives some good details) but the process must begin with a site review on different devices to see if:

• Different screen sizes present obvious and usable interfaces
• Mobile or tablet users see views customized to their devices
• Interface changes based on platform or device are logical and maintain *some* consistency across platforms
• From an SEO standpoint, best practices are followed so that Google / Bing recognized the difference between device specific sites (if different sites exist) and this mitigates potential duplicate content issues

The Search Agency (full disclosure that I work there!) recently published a Responsive Web Design whitepaper that goes in depth into the pros and cons of the technical aspect of RWD.

5. Conduct Keyword Query Research

Research keyword queries leveraging social, web stats, paid media and industry research to help understand user goals, purchasing cycles, and needs.

As noted in the keyword research article above, traditional keyword research needs to evolved to focus more on theConsumer Decision Journey and less on search volume.

What does this mean?

Search engines are interpreting each search through a lens of intent and context.

• Intent: What does the user mean based on previous searches, their search behavior?
• Context: Where are they? What device are they using?
• Both:
  • Machine learning: What do I know about this and similar users who have searched for this term (e.g., click behavior, engagement signals)?
  • Connections: If I can identify this user, what information from his connections would help or influence click and / or search behavior?

SEO professionals must understand how these factors influence search results and present the most relevant content for each of the intents and contexts that a user in a specific mindset is experiencing.

For example, a user searching using the query “price of tea” might be looking for an online tea purveyor, spot price in the commodities markets, Starbucks price list, or, if they’re standing outside a Teavana store, a comparison of their prices. If you’re Teavana, you want to make sure that a “price of tea” pages is optimized around comparisons – mentioning advantages over Starbucks, value proposition of loose leaf tea, and details of how to purchase online (or in the local store), and not commodities!

At the same time search engines improve their abilities to understand search query intent based on behavior and context, users are becoming more sophisticated and expect answers to the search queries they enter.

Google and Bing are both trying serve up the best answers feasible, and to present a quick path-to-answer improved “direct answers” with those answer appearing within the search results themselves.

Keyword query research is a fundamental need for any SEO campaign. Thinking through the lens of a user query, as opposed to just focusing on keyword volume, can help drive more valuable organic traffic.

By connecting user intent to website content, SEO practitioners can enjoy – potentially – a higher level of relevant search engine traffic that both engages and converts more efficiently.

6. Write Just Enough Content

There are no “ideal lengths” of content, only enough to satisfy user intent and the context in which they’re querying.

I remember when everyone had their favorite best practice of word count. It was a time of keyword density and keywords meta tag stuffing. They were good days, but they had to come to an end (though some still live in that dismal past!).

Here’s the real truth about word counts:

Write just enough and not too much!

There really is no ideal length, but there isan ideal question: “Should this page exist?”

The answer should consider primarily:

• The page’s uniqueness (based on other pages on the site).
• Its uniqueness (based on other pages on the web).
• Its value to users (does it answer a question they may have? FYI, analytics is your friend for engagement metrics!).
• Its accessibility from a site’s homepage (via clicks).
• The content’s ability to provide value with the correct media (image / video / text) so users are potentially inspired to share it!

Nowhere in these criteria does it mention the number of words, the ideal type of media, the density of keywords, or any of the other traditional optimization tactics.

Also, with Google’s launch of “long form” modules in the results page, the need not to count words, keywords, paragraphs, and characters is underscored!

7. Tag Your Content (Standard, Social, Schema)

Standard tags such a meta description, title, and header tags are still important for user engagement and core SEO optimization. New and necessary tags, OG for Facebook, Twitter Cards, and schema.org microdata formats are no-brainers.

In the late ’90s when I was getting my feet wet in online marketing, there were few techniques and far fewer websites, leading to an ease and confidence in getting almost anything to rank for almost anything. Tags we swore by were titles tags, meta description tag, H tags and, of course, the meta keywords tag. The tools of a trade with few tools.

Fast forward to today and there are many more tags, markup and necessities to enable better crawling, indexing and viability to rank. Through all this, the title tag has remained above most of the bickering, continuing to be the primary clickable link in the search results and (by all consensus) an important part of search engine ranking algorithms.

These “oldies but goodies” – with the exception of the black sheep keywords tag – are still important from a blocking and tackling standpoint, but alone won’t fundamentally rocket you to the top 10 of Google. These are the “Standards” which every SEO should understand, and also understand that Google may or may not decide to consider when presenting a result in the SERP.

Social tags are often overlooked, but Open Graph (OG) tags have gained importance (and will continue to) as Facebook’s Graph Search continues to build and improve to a usable state (sorry Facebook). Other social tags that look to materially help SEO from a visibility standpoint are theTwitter Cardsthat “gives users greater context and insight into the URLs shared on Twitter, which in turn allows Twitter to send more engaged traffic to your site or app.” (*love* social organic traffic!)

Schema Markup is probably the most exciting development over the past few years, and one gaining traction slowly, despite the protocols being backed by the major (and minor) search engines. At its core, schema markup allows search engines to better identify the structure of data, to facilitate more efficient crawling, indexing and presentation of search results. Google offers an excellent Schema Q&A – far more than even this article can contain – and the Schema website gives even more detail to assist in definitions and implementation.

8. Don’t Over-Optimize

Overdoing internal anchor text, linking, and excessive footer links. “Too much of a good thing” can end up being a bad thing. Keep it simple and user-focused, especially in-content anchor text links.

Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of SEO folk are also terrible online marketers, still living in the past. It doesn’t take much to see the efforts Google is putting into mitigating webspam, meaning many of the tactics we used to love and use are now obsolete.

It still pains my colleagues and I when we come upon a newly updated site that displays many SEO tactics that belong in the same era as Webkinz and High School Musical (the original movie), not least of which is over-optimization and massive challenges around internal linking.

Today’s optimization should be much more around creating a user-friendly experience, with internal linking and content that benefits users first and the most discerning of users, Google, second.

Footers with massive link counts aren’t always beneficial on every page if top or in-page navigation provides a better experience, and definitely spammy-looking keyword rich anchor text all over a page looks… well spammy.

9. Optimize the User Experience

Post-click engagement sends the signals that your site rocks, not only do users provide metrics through trackable usage, also through social signals – shares, likes and +1s

We used to look at site traffic, cheer when it went up and cry when it went down. We used to treat users as faceless entities that proved our worth as SEOs and when we boosted the key metric of “organic site visits” we expected our clients to bow down before us and call us geniuses.

The user was a metric to a means, rather than a real “metric that mattered” and for this SEOs suffered. They suffered because the rest of the marketing world scoffed and eventually asked us to justify our existance. our fees and the time it took to get nominal results.

And then “eureka” some savvy SEOs realized we weren’t all that difeferent from paid search, and display, and email marketing, we could leverage data to better understand the user and to ensure they did what we wanted them to do once they arrived at our sites, and we made sure we attracted not just more, but “more better” traffic.

And then we became user-cetric in our marketing approach. And so did Google.

Now… we need to look at what people do once they get to our site, and we need to optimize their experience, not just because Google demands a speedy site, user-friendly layouts, less ‘dead end’ 404s and onsite engagement, but because both Bing and Google say the users experience, their bounce back to the SERPs, their consistent times of engagement, and – for those trackable users – their behavior during a site session matter!

SEO doesn’t stop at the visit any longer, thinking beyond the click has become the norm, inspiring shares, mentions, interaction and satisfaction *is* a new (and welcome) paradigm of recent SEO strategies.

10. Keep Link Building Practices Natural

Create and seed great content in venues where it makes sense. If it is truly great, and you bolster its discoverability and visibility through social media mentions, you may just inspire links, and more importantly relevant traffic!

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change.” – Heraclitus

Savvy SEO practitioners know change will come, the challenge is both in planning for when and for what!

With the recent changes to link strategies, e.g. links from guest blogs, widget links and press release linking, SEOs are going to have to adapt to less rich anchor text, user focused linking, and nofollows in many cases.

“Natural” link building doesn’t appear just a Google recommendation anymore, with the introduction of Penguin penalties and frequent manual reviews, Google the ‘link police’ is a 2013 reality.

Though the best advice often repeated by Google’s Matt Cutt’s is “create great content”, SEO still needs to rely on outreach to introduce brands to relevant websites in the hope of negotiating content placements, partnerships, sponsorships or story mentions to expand digital footprints and potential traffic sources.

In this sense, the question becomes “should I still include links as part of content distribution or partnerships” and the answer is probably “sure”, as long as links or anchor text traditionally designed to manipulate PageRank are nofollowed.

3 Bonus Tips

11. Build a Brand

Do this online and offline through associations, connections, citations, and engagement. And most of all… be special!

Since Google’s Vince update, Google’s preoccupation with brands has them flying higher in the SERP

What is an online brand?

An entity that inspires, creates or demonstrates an expertise in certain topics so that other trust entities quote them, link to them, discuss them, interact with them, and show trust in their topic expertise.

A brand online can even be “created” by Google itself, through the association created by results in the top three positions on Google’s paid and organic results.

12. Use Authorship to Build Your Personal Brand (Authority)

Claim and master Google+ through their relatively easy process and correct markup of your site.

Brands are not unique just to companies, just as expertise is not unique to a few industry figureheads.

Personal brands – individuals that demonstrate expertise, trust and interaction – are also favored by search engines, with Google especially looking at the web as a web of people, connected and interacting with brands (which could be other people) they trust.

The connections created between brands, their expert content, and their ‘trusters,’ is really key to both providing relevanttrusted results, and personalizing those results so that individuals see additional trust signals in the search results specific to them.

Authorship, Google’s content verification and content association methodology ensures that connections are recognized, organized and associated with authored articles, comments, opinions (+1s), and other content attributed to specific writers(s).

Why bother? Authorship manifests in author’s photos appearing alongside content results in the search results – improving click-through rates significantly!

13. Be Social

Claim your social profiles, connect on networks relevant to your audience, and remember no platform is, or should be, an island!

Your social footprint consists of a few components:

• Claiming your relevant social profiles
• Optimizing your profiles for your topic expertise / location expertise
• Posting interesting content or relevant information, content and form factor for each platform / audience
• Connecting with your optimal audience
• Interacting with your audience
• Amplifying interactions (ensuring no platform is an island)

Social interaction and amplification has progressively become more important for SEO given the ability to deploy or promote shareable content to both “connected” and “potential” audiences, empowering both groups to engage and generate trust and topic association signals, links, citations and mentions that search engines can recognize, catalog and leverage to improve both the personalization and relevance of results.

Recent patents and experience alludes to sentiment being a factor search engines are considering as additional indicators of trust and brand… ensuring positive mentions, reviews and interactions are available, crawlable and indexable may eventually be a key component of trust signals for ranking! Engage!

By Krista LaRiviere, and first posted on SearchEngineWatch.com.

The way we market, sell and deliver SEO services has undoubtedly changed. Google’s algorithm updates have made content marketing and social media the core of a strong organic search strategy. So while the practice of SEO evolves, the definition of SEO ought to evolve as well.

Other digital marketing tactics such as email marketing, paid search and search retargeting have very clear, undisputed definitions. The definition of SEO, on the other hand, seems to be just as unclear as the practice itself.

Current Definitions of SEO

Even when you Google the phrase, “definition of SEO”, nothing really concrete is returned.

Wikipedia’s official definition is, “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page.”

Search engine optimization is about way more than this.

Webopedia’s definition is, “a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.”

SEO is more than this too.

Is Web Presence Optimization the Evolution of SEO?

So what is an accurate description of SEO given the changes to the industry?

Web presence optimization is an all-encompassing approach to optimizing an entire web presence for organic search including the website, social channels, blogs, articles and press releases. Where strategies, techniques, and tactics are still used, but content marketing and social media are strongly incorporated.

What’s Your Definition of SEO?

Here are some new definitions of SEO to consider, and I invite you to comment below with your own.

1. SEO is the ongoing process of uncovering and discovering non-branded keywords that are driving organic search traffic and conversions, then publishing content optimized for those keywords.
2. SEO is the process of producing optimized content that is discoverable by the target audience as they progress through the buying cycle.
3. SEO is about a prospect discovering a brand’s content and web presence through search and social, and the owner of that content being able to understand who consumed the content and the impact of the content across the organization.
4. SEO is the outcome of a content marketing strategy that makes use of highly converting keywords that your target audience is searching on.
5. SEO is the process of enhancing the visibility of a brand’s web presence in organic search.

SEO in the digital marketing mix is here to stay. Standardizing a definition of SEO will help buyers better understand the importance of it, the reason for committing to it, and the short- and long-term impact an SEO strategy has on a web presence.

By Lisa Buyer and first posted on SearchEngineWatch.com.

Google’s most recent update to their defintions of link schemes sent shockwaves through the SEOand online PR world; a real downer to link building strategists.

It’s true: the world’s largest search engine called links in press releases “unnatural” and is mandating nofollowing them. What does this mean to organizations using press release to gain digital visibility in search and social?

For brands publishing a press release or an article on your site and distributing it through a paid wire service, such as PR Newswire, Business Wire, Marketwire or through an article site, you must first make sure to nofollow the links if those links are “optimized anchor text.”

Is This a Big SEO Deal? Yes. No. Maybe.

Google has been slowly squeezing the SEO life out of press releases for a while now.

“In 2006 online press releases were amazing for SEO. In 2013? Not so much,” said Joe Laratro, SEO expert and PubCon lead moderator “Online press releases have had very little value in terms of links and content over the past few years – I would say it had been steadily declining. However, I still thought it was a good part of a large organic link building strategy until the new guideline changes.”

But what about the anchor text links in past press releases? Will the ghost of Google past haunt companies with surprising penalties in the future? Will brands have to back track to older press releases to protect themselves.

“The real concern for the SEO industry right now should be backdated enforcement. If this is now considered a ‘penalizable’ tactic, how are companies that have been using this tactic for over a decade going to deal with the old content and links?” Laratro asked. “How quickly can the online newswires update their systems to support the rel nofollow? In my opinion this will have a fairly large effect on the online paid newswire release business.”

Many more SEO industry experts agree. The clean up work with old press release content that’s been spinning links across the web for years is a big SEO issue.

“There are press releases archived across the web that you will have no control over – how do you clean that up?” asked Bruce Clay, president of Bruce Clay Inc. “Even if press release distribution companies do something to address their archives, like noindexing old pages (and this is a big if), you’re still looking at the larger problem of pruning links on the many sites that have republished those press releases.”

Don’t Optimize Links, Do… What?

Organizations are now left wondering what they can do with press releases past, present, and future.

“If a client has real newsworthy content, an online press release is worth doing, but I would be very careful with the links at the moment, at least until the rel=nofollow options are live,” Laratro said. “Companies should still include one or two links in order to get the reader over to the website or blog. This may cause a shift back to more traditional types of PR work – not necessarily a bad thing.”

The Ghost of Press Release Past

The first press release was written in 1906 by Ivy Lee and actually published verbatim in the New York Times. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that wire services began releasing news direct to consumers vis the Internet. Since then, journalists have relied on press releases to help track company news and come up with story angles and sources.

Today the digital press release reaches beyond the journalist and carries company news direct to customers, prospects, bloggers, and more. The press release lifeline streams through the veins of search engines and flows into social media.

Google might have killed the link juice, but press releases are still alive and kicking according to media experts.

“While most of the companies using PR Newswire (and our competitors) are doing so to build awareness of their messages, garner media pick up and to deliver their messaging straight to their target audiences, there is a contingent that are issuing press releases for the sole purpose of generating inbound links, and this is the practice Google is discouraging,” said Sarah Skerik, vice president, content marketing, PR Newswire//MultiVu. “This is not an indictment of PR.”

The Digital Path of a Press Release: It’s About Content Discovery

Press releases are more than a simple SEO tool. Press release content helps reach journalists, influencers, and consumers.

The AP, Dow Jones, Reuters, Bloomberg, and thousands of other major newsrooms worldwide have feeds of press releases piped directly into their editorial systems. And almost 8,000 websites, including some of the world’s largest news sites, publish stories as a result of wire services such as PR Newswire.

Let’s not forget the social media intersection of press releases. They help fuel the content fire and drive social interaction, sharing, and engagement – and are the launching pad for company news. Taking a drive off main street, press releases are part of the Wall Street creed, meeting financial disclosure.

In 140 characters or less: Press releases drive broad discovery of your news message in search and social.

“None of this has anything to do with link building and SEO,” Skerik said. “We believe the value press release distribution provides is in discovery, not links. Driving messages deep into audiences and generating authentic reads, clicks and visibility among relevant audiences and social shares – that’s where press releases add value.”

Hybrid search industry vet Greg Jarboe, president and founder of SEO-PR, specializes in both PR and SEO and zeroed in on the fact that the PR industry still hasn’t fully embraced the concept of public relations optimization, so they might not realize the missing link.

“This is a big SEO deal,” Jarboe said. “And it would also be a big deal for PR, if more public relations people were optimizing their press releases. But most of them still aren’t.”

Less than 15 percent of press releases in corporate newsrooms and posted on the wire services are optimized for search, according to a PressFeed Online Newsroom Survey.

12 Things You Can Do With Digital Press Releases

1. Adding links still helps drive traffic to a website. “Driving traffic is one of the primary objectives of website SEO, according to the SEMPO State of Search Report, published by Econsultancy. It can be one of the important objectives of press release SEO, too,” Jarboe said.
2. Improve the user experience.
3. Increase visibility in search and social.
4. Use press releases as inroads to more information and details on a blog or website.
5. Spark a story idea and attract a journalist or blogger to do a larger story that might gain a natural link.
6. Educate and inform your audience.
7. Build relationships.
8. Report company news or industry data.
9. Use images and video to increase pageviews and attention.
10. Embed video and multimedia.
11. Create an infographic version of press release tell your story.
12. Broaden your distribution and use social networks to report news – both paid and organic.

5 Things You Can’t Do With Press Releases

1. Generate inbound links.
2. Add link juice to your SEO campaign.
3. Use press releases as part of your link building strategy.
4. Optimized anchor text links, Google now says this equates to unnatural links.
5. Keyword stuffing.

Summary

Google may have taken away the anchor text links in press releases (and guest posts and articles), but there is still room for press release optimization opportunities like in any other digital content using:

• Optimized keywords.
• Headlines.
• Title.
• Description. 
• Hashtags.
• Photos.
• Videos.
• Social media messaging.

Gaming the system is yesterday’s news. Today’s press releases still work the natural, social, and mobile way of tomorrow.

By Jay Taylor and first posted on SearchEngineWatch.com.

Correctly measuring the success of an SEO campaign can vary greatly depending on the type of business you’re in and your objectives.

This article first appeared on MASHABLE and was written by a staff writer.

Since Tumblr’s acquisition by Yahoo, users have been seeing an uptick in ads. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though; Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said early and often that monetizing the microblogging platform “in a way that’s meaningful and additive to the user experience” would be a priority.

When Mayer made these announcements, she couldn’t have known exactly what she’d be getting in the way of campaigns. And yet, some brands have spent the past few months producing initiatives that fit her description well. Not only are they meaningful in the sense that they provide value to the user – whether in the form of visual interest or informational content – but they also enhance the Tumblr experience. Brands are creating pages, photos and animated GIFs that are worth reblogging and that users are happy to share — despite the fact that they bear the mark of the “sponsored post” dollar sign.

Picture the Trip of Your Dreams

To promote its Venture Card, Capital One is tapping into users’ wanderlust and creating image-based content — something brands are finding great success with on the platform. Studies show that the majority of Tumblr posts include photographs, and that photos get the most notes (including reblogs). In the case of the Venture Bucket List Tumblr, Capital One is asking users to post their travel dreams. It then tasks artists and illustrators with turning those dream destinations into static and animated GIFs.

Image: Capital One/Tumblr

The brand endorses the use of the #BucketList hashtag to encourage additional conversation on Facebook and Twitter. In their company-generated posts, Capitol One emphasizes the fact that the Venture Card can help consumers build up the miles they need to see Machu Picchu or travel throughout Eastern Europe (“So go ahead, Czech that off your #BucketList!”). Those who choose to follow the page are frequently treated to new consumer-inspired imagery to help them keep their travel dreams alive.

Show Character

When The Art Institute of Chicago revealed a new exhibit last month called “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity,” which combines fashions from the 1800s with famous works of Impressionist art, it drummed up added interest with a unique character-driven Tumblr page. Following the exploits of fictional 19th-century Parisian Jean-Paul Brunier as he explores 21st-century Chicago, the blog features photographs of artwork on display at the museum alongside pictures of stylish modern-day Chicagoans.

Image: Art Institute of Chicago/Tumblr

When the page first launched, it wasn’t entirely clear whether the Art Institute was behind it, and that added to the intrigue. Now the Art Institute is using Twitter to drive traffic as well — maintaining a character account with tweets written in the voice of Monsieur Brunier, as well as emailing video postcards that feature information about the exhibit’s artists. As a means of providing interesting themed content and generating buzz among fashion-conscious social media users, the cross-era fashion blogger concept is clever as can be. Followers of the Impressions & Fashion page might even see themselves featured online.

Make a Scene

The comedy website CollegeHumor launched its first original feature film with a Tumblr campaign that leveraged the power of the animated GIF. Called Coffee Town, the movie was promoted on the Tumblr-based CollegeHumor Staff Blog with a page skin, while the GIF appeared both on the blog and as an ad on Tumblr users’ dashboards.

Image: CollegeHumor/Tumblr

What’s different about this campaign is the GIF content: It rotated the promotional poster with a selection of scenes from the film. This approach gave viewers a sneak peek, trailer-style, while also ensuring they’d recognize and recall the visual content used for branding across the web — a critical point for a movie distributed primarily through digital channels.

The success of Tumblr campaigns depends on the ability of brand marketers to make their ads and blogs as interesting as the user-generated content they’ll ultimately sit alongside. Take a tip from Marissa Mayer and aim for meaningful. Only then will your campaigns resonate with users.

Mashable composite. Image: RUSSELLTATEdotCOM/iStockphoto

by Nathan Safran and first posted on SearchEngineLand.com.

Occasionally, marketers want something because the media attention around it demands it.  There was a time, not too long ago, when CMOs sent urgent, late-night emails to their teams asking about their “link-shortening strategy.”

In some ways, “big data” technology falls into that category. Mainstream tech media and even traditional media outlets write about it incessantly — there are 5 pages of results for “big data” on Techcrunch…

…and the “infinite scroll” of Mashable’s search results really is infinite when it comes to results for “big data.”

While I don’t wish to disparage marketers by implying that we pursue the latest and greatest thoughtlessly, any Communications major can tell you that the influence of media on perception is powerful. The result of the increasing buzz surrounding big data is that we are in danger of wanting a big data product for the sake of having big data, without really understanding what a big data product can actually do for us.

Why Now?

The data show that now is the right time to be having this conversation. A recent Conductor survey of search marketers shows that we have hit critical mass, with nearly 6 out of 10 search marketers (59%) currently using or looking to acquire a big data product (e.g., Conductor Searchlight, Moz, Marin Software, etc.).

Given the large number of search marketers that are using or considering using a big data product, I’d like to take this opportunity to do two things:

1. Redefine how we think about “big data” technology products
2. Based on our newly adjusted definition, offer several examples of how big data applies to search marketers

Hitting Home Runs With Actionable Big Data

Wikipedia defines big data as follows:

…a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.

This definition focuses primarily on the quantity of data in a big data framework, rather than the insight gained from this warehouse of data. But, there is another, more sophisticated way of thinking about big data.

A recent Geekwire article on Seattle startup IdealSeat describes the company’s clever use of big data — one that leverages large quantities of data to produce actionable insight for the user.IdealSeat maps foul balls at stadiums, and its mobile app tells you where to sit for your best chance of catching a foul ball.

Source: Geekwire, used with permission.
Want to catch more foul balls? IdealSeat shows you where to sit at the ballgame.

Currently, IdealSeat only works for two stadiums: Safeco and Citi Field, home of the New York Mets. But there are plans to have three-to-five “research team members” collect data at places like Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco and Pittsburgh.

(Incidentally, if anyone knows if they are hiring, let me know. I am available to, ahem, be a “research team member.”)

This example of a technology solution that inhales large quantities of data and exhales actionable user insight from that data is reflective of the way we should be thinking about big data.

With that revised understanding, I’d like to suggest an adjustment to our “big data” definition:

…a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. A “big data system” is one that warehouses the data, but also extricates and displays the data in a manner that makes it actionable for the user.

Examples Of “Big Data” Applications For Search Marketers

Now that we have amended the definition of “big data,” let’s explore ways in which big data can produce actionable insight for the search marketer:

1. Identify search visibility trends. A Conductor study showed that “scaling keywords” is now the second biggest goal for search marketers, even ahead of further developing a social presence. With more keywords comes more data, and industry big data applications can now gather, mine, and (most importantly) present the data in such a way that visibility trends become immediately apparent for marketers to take action on.

2. Discover and monitor the competitive landscape. Another example of actionable insight from big data is competitive landscape discovery and monitoring. Big data technology can discover natural search competitors, display trends over time and also allow for analysis on a more granular level. When combined with keyword segmentation, this kind of big data application can be made even more powerful and provide the marketer with actionable insight by product line.
3. Discover content/optimization opportunities. The data and sophistication now available to search’s big data products means they can now mine on-page, off-page, PPC, social and other data sources to discover actionable opportunities for content development or on- and off-page optimizations.

Conclusion:  Focus On The Actionable Insight, Not The Hype

Although big data is a hot topic in marketing circles these days, it is important for marketers to focus on the actionable insight that a “big data” platform can bring rather than focusing on ticking a box on the hot trend of the week.  Today, modern Search “big data” platforms can leverage the large quantities of data available across disparate sources and produce insight for those with an actionable mindset.

By Ken Lyons and first appearing on SearchEngineWatch.com.

Traffic is great. Traffic that doesn’t convert? Not so great.

Don’t get me wrong. I like big traffic numbers just as much as the next guy. In fact, sustained organic traffic growth means what I’m doing is working (for the most part). More people are coming to your site via search engines.

But traffic data doesn’t tell you if those visitors are doing anything of value when they get to your site.

What I really love are conversions. Because conversions, not traffic, pay the bills.

What’s more, proprietary conversion data helps you figure out what is and what isn’t working for an ROI standpoint; where to spend more marketing dollars, where to spend less; which marketing channels are profitable, which aren’t. And that stuff is pretty important. More important that how many visits you’re getting.

This post will outline a six-step process to help you figure out which keywords are driving conversions, and actionable steps to improve the performance of your best and worst performing terms, so you can generate even more conversions.

Step 1: Find Keywords that Convert

This step assumes you have Google Analytics installed on your site and you have goal tracking set up. If you don’t, here are some great tutorials to get you up and running:

• How to Configure & Track Google Analytics Goals for SEO
• How to Setup Goals in Google Analytics – Google Analytics Blog
• How to Set Up Goals and Track Conversions in Google Analytics – Sprout Social

There are a few ways to uncover keywords that convert on your site. You can either create a custom report to isolate unique visits and goal completions by keyword. Or you can manually drill down into your traffic sources and isolate goals as they correspond to keywords.

Note: You can find this data in the illustration above by clicking Traffic Sources>Search>Organic and then selecting a Goal Set in Google Analytics.

You then will sort by goal conversion rate to find the highest converting keywords. I like to qualify the data a bit more and include only visits that are “greater than” a specific threshold. This helps filter out the low visit high conversion numbers, which are often misleading.

I typically set advanced filtering for visit thresholds of “greater than” 10, 50, 100, 200 and up, depending on how much traffic the site is generating.

Step 2: Find Corresponding URLs

You also want to determine which pages on your site are driving these keyword conversions. So the next step is to click on “secondary dimension,” and select Traffic Sources>Landing Page from the drop down menu.

You can now export this report to Excel and perform the remainder of your work outside of analytics.

Step 3: Find Out Where Those Keywords Rank

Now that you have your list of the highest converting keywords for your site, you want to determine where they rank.

Again, the goal here is to get these keywords to work even harder for you, which means getting those terms (and the corresponding URLs) to rank higher improve their visibility. So you need to determine current SERP position.

As for rank tracking, my favorite tools are:

• Link Assistant
• Microsite Masters

Step 4: Create Your Keyword Conversion Report

Once you have keyword rankings, you can pop that info to your spreadsheet along with your list of keywords, corresponding URLs, and conversion rates. Keep visits in the mix as well, since it’s another useful data point, and keyword demand can help you prioritize.

What we typically find during this process are keywords that convert, but aren’t ranking as high as they could be. This presents some really great opportunities because if you can improve SERP visibility for some or all of your top converting keywords, you can exponentially grow conversions.

You can prioritize your efforts in a number of ways as well and determine whether to focus on:

• The highest ranking terms.
• The highest converting terms.
• The highest traffic terms.

For me, I like to scale my efforts and that’s often one way to prioritize, which is why having the corresponding URL is critical. Many times I’ll see multiple high-value keywords tied to the same URL. By focusing on improving the “SEO value” of that URL/page, you can typically increase the rankings of all keywords tied to that URL (i.e., “a rising tide lifts all ships”).

Step 5: Focus on Improving Rankings for Those Keywords

Next steps are to improve the rankings for your highest converting keywords. This means working on both on-site and off-site SEO tactics, which include:

• On-page SEO: Evaluate these pages to ensure they’re as “optimized” as they should be. For example, review title tag structures; keyword placement in headlines, subheads, and body copy, image tagging and see if you can make improvements.
• Beefing up content: We’re seeing a temporal increases in rankings for most if not all keywords that are tied to a URL when content on that page is “freshened up” and improved on (i.e., reworked, rewritten, added to, made more relevant and/or more informative). And in many cases, these temporal rankings stick.
• Internal linking: Grab a list of the most linked to pages on your site. Add anchor text links on those pages back to the pages you’re trying to rank higher, so you can pass pooled link equity and semantic relevance signals to them. Here are more tips on internal linking strategies you can leverage as well. This also serves to move pages higher up in the navigation and fewer clicks from the home page, a nice authority signal.
• Inbound linking: You can prioritize your inbound link building efforts to these target URLs as well. Just don’t overdo it with exact match anchors. Mix in branded links, hybrid variations anchors, citations and trigger words as well to keep it “natural.” I like to review the existing backlink profile of these URLs in ahrefs to get a sense of the existing keyword anchor ratios to inform my anchor text decisions.
• Social signals: Get some shares for these documents (naturally or unnaturally…up to you). Social shares may not be a direct ranking signal (yet…), but good content gets shared and likely can help reinforce popularity and interest-level in a document for engines.

Step 6: Iterate Across Your Site

OK, so you’ve unearthed your highest converting keywords. You’ve mapped those keywords to corresponding URLs. You know where they rank. And you’re working to improve those rankings to grow conversions (and revenue) even more.

The next step, it’s time to leverage that proprietary intelligence that you acquired during this process and apply it to keywords (and corresponding documents) that are underperforming on your site.

To do so, you’re going to:

• Pull a report of your lowest converting keywords (same procedure as finding your highest converting keywords but just sort by lowest goal completions).
• Pull a list of corresponding landing pages.
• Determine where they rank.

Now you want to audit and evaluate each of those pages and the keyword queries that drive traffic to them and see what improvements can be made.

Some factors to compare and contrast and questions to ask in this process are:

Why do these top-performing keywords convert better than others?

• Are they higher intent?
• Are they closer to sale?
• Are they more aligned with the offer on my page?
• Are they longer tail and very specific to the users query vs more general terms?
• Are they product centric (“link building tool” vs “link building”) vs information gathering searches?

What about the corresponding landing page for those keywords? What’s the difference between the top performing landing pages and those that convert poorly? Ask yourself:

• Is it the quality of the content? Is one page better written, more informative, more value-driven than the other pages?
• Is it page structure and format? Is that page laid out better and easier to read and scan?
• Is it the offer? Is it driving to a product download (which is too aggressive) when it should be a free report or newsletter signup?
• Is the topic and the keywords we’re targeting on that page? Are they somehow misaligned with user intent? Are users not finding what they want on a page?

Now apply this knowledge to your pages that don’t convert as well or at all.

Here’s a real world example. A company that sells a cyber security solution published dozens of dedicated pages on the most malicious security threats as part of a keyword strategy. Smart thinking, since if someone is looking for info on a security threat, there’s a good chance they’re trying to prevent it from happening.

And those individual threats pages drove tons of visits. Terrific, right? Not so much.

Turns out the bulk of the traffic came from fledgling hackers, looking for tips or tricks on embedding malicious code (i.e., a lot of searches related to “how to perform”), and not from the consumer audience they were targeting.

Needless to say, a group of keywords that should convert really well for them didn’t drive any conversions at all. So the solution was to rework the content, re-target the pages with better-aligned modifiers, re-focus their phrase-driven link building efforts, develop a better offer that would resonate with consumers, and use clearer SERP descriptions to better qualify clicks, etc.

The results: a marked increase in qualified traffic, leads and conversions.

By Brad Miller and first appearing on SearchEngineWatch.com.

Planning a website redesign can be an extremely exciting process. You have a blank canvas to which you can easily add your own creativity and flair. It’s tempting to get carried away.

Unfortunately, most designers and creative teams will use this opportunity to focus entirely on the visual design of the site, and overlook SEO, content, and functionality.

Sites with a history of good search traffic can see most or even all of that traffic vanish after a redesign. That new site may look great, but that won’t be much consolation to their owners!

Yes, it’s important to have a great looking website. It needs to look great if it’s going to convert your visitors into paying customers, but traffic, conversions, and functionality are what will ultimately govern its success or failure.

So, what are the key considerations when implementing a site re-design?

1. Have You Done Your Research?

To design a website that’s going to deliver results, you need to know who you’re targeting. The design, functionality, and SEO focus should all be dictated by informed research. That meansmarket research, keyword research, and community mapping.

This should be your first port of call, not an afterthought. If you have this information from the very beginning you can then use in in every aspect of your redesign.

Benchmarking your existing data will allow you to identify what is currently working, and what has worked in the past. Be sure to evaluate which pages are the most popular, convert the best, rank and deliver the most leads/sales. Doing so will fuel the new site with proven techniques and allow you to gauge the site’s success post-launch.

2. Website Structure

A redesign isn’t simply a chance to give your website a fresh look. It also gives you the opportunity to reorganize the way your site is structured.

To make sure your information architecture is set up for optimal visibility and conversions, your priority should be analyzing the effectiveness of your current site:

• Which pages convert the best? 
• What’s the most common route through your website? 
• Do some pages have a high bounce rate?

Use all of this information to improve the architecture of your new site.

Mobile phones, tablets and alternative devices must also be considered. There are a few primary approaches:

• Responsive
• Adaptive
• Mobile site
• Apps

Each approach has their advantages. You’ll want to consider factors like site goals, personalization, site complexity, timeframe, and budgets.

3. Redirects – 301 & Canonicals

Inventory all pages, incoming links, and pages that rank well from the very beginning. Don’t forget about subdomains.

As the URL structure is changed, a redirect strategy will be incredibly important to retaining any SEO rankings and rerouting referral traffic to the new pages/URLs.

Audit and analyze where all incoming links are coming from, and going to. This can be done using tools like Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, among others.

Once you have an inventory of backward links, you’ll want to map them along with all pages to their new location using 301 redirects. This is also a great time to establish your canonical strategyfor “www”, index files, and other forms of duplicate content.

Tip: The redirect strategy will likely change based on design, navigation, and content, among other factors. Knowing this in advance will help alleviate future frustrations.

4. Navigation

How easily your site can be navigated, by both human visitors and search engine spiders, will have a significant effect on the visibility and success of your new website. You need to look at site structure from two different standpoints:

• How are people going to find your site? This is where you need to be thinking about your URL structure. Can it be shortened? Are there lots of unnecessary characters? Does the URL give pride of place to the term you’d most like that page to rank well for? 
  A redesign gives you the chance to give your entire URL structure a reshuffle and cut away any dead wood that may have developed as part of your existing site’s development. Your new URL structure and sitemap should make it easy for the search engines to see what each page is about and make sure that you’re using the most important terms for each of your campaigns.
• How your human visitors will navigate the site once they’ve found it? Which pages have you identified as your primary entry points? What action do you want visitors to each of these pages to take? What journey will they need to take in order to take that desired action? Can you do anything to shorten this journey or increase conversions? 
  By taking an informed, data-driven look at your existing site structure and optimizing it in line with your new site’s primary objectives, you have a chance to drastically improve the performance of your site.

5. Where Does the Content Fit In?

We all know that content is the most important aspect of any digital campaign. So why is it still so often an afterthought when sites are designed?

The quality, visibility, and relevance of your content will be the most influential factor in determining the success or failure of your new site. Shouldn’t it be given some attention during the design process?

One primary consideration is what type of content will be published on-site.

• Are you going to have a blog? 
• Is that blog going to be mostly visual or will you be publishing long, informative articles?

These questions should always be answered before you start designing the site. This gives you the opportunity to effectively integrate the blog into the overall design of your new website. It will also give you a chance to make sure that visitors can always find the most relevant content for them – and that they can find your blog, no matter what page they’re on.

Another consideration is whether you’ll be offering any other content through your site.

• Will you be publishing whitepapers, eBooks, video tutorials? 
• If so, how will they be delivered? 
• Will you offer them in return for an email address? 
• Will they be available to anyone, or only available to members?

As with each of the previous points, considering your content before you finalize the site design will make it far more functional, profitable, and effective.

6. Technical SEO

Your site’s position in the SERPs depends on many different factors (more than 200, according to Google). This means that your redesign gives you more than 200 different areas that you can look to improve, condense, and build on to increase your search visibility, site authority, and trust.

Three key areas you should pay close attention to during the redesign process are:

• Page load times: Far too often companies launch a site that looks great, but only if you wait around for long enough for the homepage to load. Unfortunately, visitors to your site won’t put up with it, and as a result, neither will the search engines. Your redesign should be seen as an opportunity to speed up your site, not slow it down.
• Compliance: This area is also often overlooked by site designers. If you want your site to work in the modern online marketplace it needs to conform to recognized standards. This means it needs to adhere to section 508 and W3C compliance factors as well as EU Cookie laws (if applicable).
• Coding: Your site redesign should be seen as an opportunity to give your code a spring-clean. As you know, search engine spiders can only read text. Images, videos and other web elements can all hide and disguise this text so that search engines have difficulty reading it. This means that they are also very unlikely to give your pages high visibility for those disguised terms. To ensure that your site has the greatest possible search visibility, you need to make sure that your code makes it as easy as possible for the spiders to crawl your site. If you’re in any doubt, use a tool like this to see your pages from a search engines point of view.

7. Testing

In an ideal situation, budgets and time would be unlimited. If we had the budget and time, every single component of the site would be pitted in a death match fight to the death based on analytical data. This would include all wireframes, mock-ups, images, color, content and the list goes on.

Obviously, we can’t do this. But don’t forget about the advantages gained if we could, and remember to incorporate testing into your process.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is quickly evolving into an entirely integrated discipline. A website redesign is a major event in any digital marketing campaign, so it makes sense that this process should also be as integrated as possible.

If a site is going to deliver real value, it shouldn’t be left to just designers and aesthetic considerations. Your SEO team, copywriters, sales team and social media managers should all be heavily involved, right from the start.

By Jessica Davis, Godot Media, and originally posted on Website Magazine.

With more than 1 billion active users, Facebook is the best place to attract new customers and leads. Moreover, to increase its earnings and profits, Facebook has provided advertisers with the perfect API and platform to advertise on. So if you notice that your Facebook ad campaigns are failing, it is not because the Facebook advertising API is flawed but rather your advertising campaigns and strategies are. Here are 6 reasons why your Facebook ad campaigns are failing and how you can correct these errors.

1. CALLS-TO-ACTION ARE ABSENT
Facebook ads are small and advertisers and marketers have very little real estate to get their message in. Advertisers have only 90 characters to get all their text in and this means that advertisers focus more on describing their products and services than optimizing their calls-to-action. One of the biggest mistakes that advertisers make is cutting out the call-to-action from their Facebook ads. Advertisers think that a call-to-action merely states what the person looking at the ad already knows. They think that people will click on their ads even if they don’t tell them to.

However, this is not true. People are more prone to take action if they see a call-to-action in a Facebook ad. Something as simple as “Click Here!” can improve the efficacy of your ad campaigns. This is why you need to make sure that you place a call-to-action – no matter how simple it is – in your Facebook ads.

2. WRONG ADVERTISING TYPE
Facebook offers a plethora of advertisement types to help advertisers create effective campaigns. However, with more than 40 different types of Facebook ads available to advertisers, most end up choosing the wrong type. All the ads can be categorized into two types – Marketplace Ads and Premium Ads. The former are lower in cost, are meant for higher reach, and must be used if advertisers want more likes or fans for a particular page.
Premium Ads are best used to promote products and services as Facebook users engage more with such ads. Sponsored stories and promoted posts are examples of Premium Ads. Advertisers very often get confused between the two and wonder why their ad campaigns are not meeting expectations. Facebook offers excellent tutorials and samples about its advertising API. Read up and research all the ad types Facebook has to offer before creating your Facebook ad campaigns.

3. NO ADDITIONAL VALUE
Today, people always want more. If you are able to offer more than just your products and services to people, then there is no reason why they will not flock to your brand. However, most advertisers are unable to convey this benefit through their Facebook ads. You may have placed a great call-to-action in your ads and added great pictures but you need something more to motivate people to click on your ads. People want to know exactly why they should follow your call-to-action and what’s in it for them.
You can offer discounts, free eBooks, brochures, etc. to get more people to click on your ads. Think of the assets and content that your brand can afford to give away free or at a lower price and highlight such offers in your Facebook ads.

4. SPAMMY ADS
When advertisers are creating Facebook ads, they often forget what the ads will look like to a Facebook user. Marketers often make the huge mistake of adding too much text or irrelevant images to their advertisements, which can get their ads classified as spam. Instead of using the company or product name as the headline of your ads, make the headlines interesting and eye-catching. Make sure the image is relevant and looks good even when it is shrunk to such a small size. Also, the copy of the ad must be attractive too with the right call-to-action.

5. INSUFFICIENT TESTING
Creating the best Facebook ad campaign you possibly can is not a matter of luck or chance. You can create the best ad campaigns by testing thoroughly. The smallest changes in text, images and ad type can result in a huge difference for your ad campaign. Smart Facebook marketers create multiple campaigns with differing copies, imagery, target audience, etc. and monitor the results of each. After thorough testing, you will be able to figure out the best and most effective ad campaign for your brand. Make sure to keep the budget on your ads low while testing them out. When you find the most successful ad campaign type, scale it up quick.

6. WRONG TARGETING
Sometimes the Facebook ads are perfect but are not successful because they are targeted at the wrong people. Once you have a Facebook Business page setup for your brand, use the Facebook Insights feature to understand your fan base and how to target your audience best. This feature offers information about the interests, geographic data, age groups, etc. of your fans and followers allowing you to create the type of ads that appeal to them best.

Jessica Davis is a Content Strategy Specialist with Godot Media – a leading Content Marketing firm. She has years of experience as an eBook writer and works closely with online businesses, helping them succeed. She also works with the copywriting service team, implementing best practices for content search optimization and share-ability enhancement. Her other interests besides online content strategy, internet marketing and search engine optimization are, technology, sports and fashion.

– See more at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2013/07/12/6-reasons-facebook-ad-campaigns-fail.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter#sthash.MU470TIA.dpuf