Purina Cat Chow tapped into both my love for my cats and my vanity with it’s “We Are Cat People” Twitter campaign. That’s a potent combination! They invited people to tweet the reasons why they are cat people, and selected some of those tweets to appear in Times Square. That was pretty neat already, but I was surprised to see that they also took a photo of the billboard and tweeted it back to the submitter. Now THAT is a recipe for increasing engagement! Here’s how it looked:
Tags: promotion
Excerpts from my latest article at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog: “How Social Media Boosts Organic Search.”
Search engines like Google develop algorithms to determine the quality of a site’s content as well as its contextual relevance and link popularity. Site quality is a pretty nebulous concept for a piece of software to understand, but search engineers have linked social signals such as Facebook’s Likes, shares and comments, Google+’s shares, +1s and comments, and Twitter’s tweets and retweets to the quality of the page being shared. The more shares, the higher quality a page must be. There are other quality signals in play as well — hundreds of signals factor into each engine’s algorithm — but social signals are thought to be harder to manipulate than linking signals.
The most obvious way that social signals impact search results is in each individual searcher’s personalized search. For example, a Google search for “social search” returns different search results depending on whether I’m logged in to my Google account. On the left below are the search results I see when I’m logged out of Google search. On the right below are the results for the same search when I’m logged in to my Google account.
The point is that I may be the only person who will see this exact personalized search result. My circle of friends in Google+ shared 130 items relevant to the phrase “social search.” To have the same set of results, you would have to have those same 130 friends in your Google+ circles….
Read the article in full at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog »
Tags: google, search results
My pal PJ Fusco, SEO expert and co-lover of all things geeky, gave me the best birthday present ever. A coffee mug for my office freaturing the intricate diagram of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. The game was originally invented in the early part of the century by Sam Kass and Karen Bryla, but you probably know it now from its cameos on CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory.” God, I love that show.
Here’s the classic clip of Sheldon explaining the game’s rules at lightning speed. One day I aspire to be able to do the same.
Scissors cut paper
Paper covers rock
Rock crushes lizard
Lizard poisons Spock
Spock smashes scissors
Scissors decapitate lizard
Lizard eats paper
Paper disproves Spock
Spock vaporizes rock
Rock crushes scissors
Tags: fun
Fellow SEO fanatic and fiancé Brian Brown, director of product management at Covario, was the inspiration for this post. One of our many SEO over dinner conversations.
Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “Google’s Secure Search Squeezes SEO Planning and Reporting.”
Google’s secure SSL search protects users’ search results and the keywords they searched on. Unfortunately, it also poses a growing threat to data-driven search engine optimization. Firefox recently joined Google Chrome — and Google.com, for logged-in users — in defaulting to secure search. This has the side effect of increasing the number of “Not Available” or “Not Provided” search keywords in web analytics reports.
In the past, SSL search was too slow and cumbersome to use as a default. Web analytics programs could easily pick out most of the keywords that referred traffic to the site from Google.com. Today, with SSL search the default on Google.com for logged in users as well as the default on Chrome and Firefox browsers, a growing number of Google.com referral strings are coming into web analytics with no keyword information associated. Consequently, if a site optimizes a page for a certain keyword phrase, its ability to measure how many organic searches were referred from Google via that keyword phrase is diminished.
In 2011, Google reported that it handled 143.5 billion searches a month. Google represents 66.4 percent of the search engine market share, according to comScore’s February 2012 report. The Chrome and Firefox browsers together represent 39.8 percent of the browser market share, according to Net Market Share’s February 2012 reporting. Consequently, 26.4 percent — 66.4 x 39.8 — of all searches last month were conducted on Google in Chrome or Firefox. If this trend holds, 26.4 percent of all searches going forward will be stripped of their keyword data. And this doesn’t include the searches conducted by users logged in to Google properties and searching Google from any web browser.
Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »
Tags: google, keyword research, measurement
Excerpts from my latest article at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog: “Using Rich Snippets to Attract More Search Customers.”
Top rankings can be hard enough to achieve sometimes, but the battle for organic search clicks doesn’t stop with high rankings in Google and Bing. Search result bling, more commonly known as rich snippets, draws searchers’ eyes by adding visual flair to the plain blue link and black description that usually make up a search result snippet. The most commonly seen rich snippet adds yellow reviews stars next to some search results, but recipes, music, software applications, mug shots, videos and more can all be incorporated into search results as rich snippets.
For example, which of these search results for Jessica Simpson’s Evangela shoes grabs your eye? Heels.com tops the organic search results with a video rich snippet at position 1, and Zappos is dead on their heels (pardon the pun) with a video snippet of their own. The number 3 result is a plain snippet for Heels.com that gets lost in all the visual competition, and Google claims the 3.5 position for its own visually enhanced Google Shopping results.
Find out more about rich snippets and how to implement them. Read the article in full at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog »
Tags: microdata, rich snippets, video
